Bio & CV
MARGOT HERSTER
Margot Herster is a documentary and public art director, educator and institution designer who engages arts- and technology-based processes for archiving, collaboration and participation that challenge entrenched systems of political representation.
Herster’s interest in documentary and public art as social and educational action is realized through interdisciplinary co-creation and organizing. Her work emphasizes digital and material culture as tools and traces of personal and institutional interaction and often combines photography, texts, video, sound, interactive and non-traditional artifacts that impart historical memory in sometimes unforeseeable ways.
Features and reviews of Herster’s work have appeared in International Herald Tribune, National Public Radio, Journal of War & Culture Studies, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, Al Jazeera English, Media-N, Brooklyn Rail, New York Magazine, and Amitava Kumar’s post-9/11 survey A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb published by Duke University Press, among many others.
Margot Herster at the site of Bureau of Change, her off-campus academic studio where she taught collaborative documentary and public art as a form of civic engagement in New Orleans. Photo by Travis Burke, 2022.
Herster teaches, exhibits and publishes at museums and academic institutions, as well as in embedded, networked and locally-situated initiatives. Museum and gallery spaces that have presented Herster’s work in one-person exhibitions include Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans; Sesnon Gallery at the University of California-Santa Cruz; President’s Gallery at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York; Gottesman Libraries at Columbia University, New York; FotoFest, Houston; and Scalo Project Space, New York; among others. Collective and group exhibitions include Material Art Fair, Mexico City; Emily and Todd Voth Artspace, Kansas City; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; Arthouse (now The Contemporary), Austin; Exit Art, New York; Galerie Mycroft, Paris; Galeria Cozinha at Universidade do Porto, Portugal, among many others.
From 2012 to 2024, Herster founded and served as lead faculty of Bureau of Change, New Orleans, a cross-institution academic studio she developed with college students and recent graduates in Louisiana that activated paid creative research apprenticeships, under her direction, in collaborative documentary and public art as a form of civic engagement. Along with cross-institution projects, Herster has held research and teaching appointments at Louisiana State University Center for Computational Technology’s interdisciplinary digital media initiative, the Department of Filmmaking and Photography at the Kansas City Art Institute, Teachers College at Columbia University, and Kresge College at University of California, Santa Cruz. She has presented lectures, panel discussions, and academic workshops at Harvard Innovation Lab, NYU Cantor Film Center, University of Texas School of Law, School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, Honors College at Louisiana State University, E.A.S.T., Pelican Bomb Gallery, Creative Time Summit, Hand-in-Glove, FemTechNet, and Aicon Gallery, among others.